Why the future must be brownfield
Around the country, brownfield developments of varying scale and ambition are demonstrating what can be achieved. Everton Football Club’s new stadium at Bramley Moore Dock, for instance, is set to extend Liverpool’s famous waterfront. Similarly, under-used land is the focus of York Central, a 45-hectare mixed-use scheme that will one day deliver 2,500 homes and more than 800,000 sq ft of commercial space adjacent to York railway station.
Major brownfield schemes show the regional ambition implicit in the Levelling Up agenda and come in the wake of game changers such as Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London, Birmingham’s Brindley Place and Salford’s MediaCity UK that achieved profile on a global scale.
The UK needs more success stories: rising land values and demand for housing are putting ever more pressure on real estate development – and ensuring that brownfield sites are increasingly where we must turn.
The Council for the Protection of Rural England is one of many groups to highlight that there is plenty of suitable brownfield land available to leave greenbelt untouched. In England, for example, it maintains that more than one million homes could be delivered on brownfield land.
In turn, successive UK governments have targeted brownfield development as key to tackling the housing crisis. In 2022, for example, local councils were able to bid for support from the £180 million Brownfield Development Fund 2, which was established to help deliver up to 17,000 new homes. It followed on from a previous £77 million scheme to support unlocking brownfield sites.
Yet for all the positive momentum, there is still a sense that, beyond the showcase projects, brownfield development is not working as well as it could. Too often schemes fail to progress because of the perceived risks involved.
In this Intelligent Solutions roundtable hosted by Morgan Sindall Construction, we brought together senior leaders in the UK regeneration community to explore the new ideas, innovations and unpack the approaches that will help release the value in these sites.
We met in an office within the King’s Cross development in London, one of the capital’s largest regeneration projects, where a former industrial district has been brought back to bustling life. The expert panel explored the practical issues involved in speeding up UK regeneration and renewal.
Duncan Cumberland | Residential Director, Muse Developments + English Cities Fund (ECF), Matt Chandler | Managing Director, Godwin Developments, Tracey Gordon | Lead Officer, Housing Partnerships at Liverpool City Region Combined Authority, Rachel Lever | Chief Executive, Marches LEP, Victoria Hills | Chief Executive, Royal Town Planning Institute, Neil Murray | Chief Executive, Impact Data Metrics, Pat Boyle | Managing Director, Morgan Sindall Construction, Richard Dobson | Area Director - London, Morgan Sindall Construction. Discussion chaired by Chris Hulme, Director, Influential.
Find out more about our Intelligent Solutions approach here.
